Skiing Ninja will be three years old early next year. If it was some clever marketing ploy, I would be working for someone else coming up with these clever marketing ploys and making a hell of a lot more money than I do here.

As far as not sending Ian the XO, I made a business decision to sign an exclusivity deal. It's just business; there is being skeptical and then there is being paranoid...

Again, it would be trivial for someone to order it and mail it to Ian. They can even return it for full credit. If this was BS, why is it so easy verify?

I too do not believe in coincidences... a distinctly human construct designed to make sense in a non-sensical world...

Originally Posted By: mdrew

I have to admit that I am now skeptical and am wondering if all this was nothing more than a clever marketing ploy. I was in total support of this product and Mr. Ninja until the Ninja and/or fate changed the rules of the game, and his (their) mind(s) to send Ian a crossover for testing.

I do not believe in coincidences. I have yet to actually meet one……

My skepticism is because you obviously made the initial offer to send Ian a crossover when you were in the middle of contract negotiations. I personally would not have made the offer if I was in the negotiation stage (in my line of work I work with contracts on a daily basis). To me, this timing issue leads one to wonder if the offer was sincere. I know that comes across as confrontational, but I hope you not take offense to it and try to understand my comments from my point of view.

I am not a ‘glass half empty’ sort of fella. I need two glasses because one is overfilling. I am trying hard to believe you had nothing but good intentions and are an honorable person, and coincidentally, the deal just fell through because of fate / timing. However, it is a hard pill for me to swallow. Yes, I could buy a crossover and send it to Ian myself as you clearly stated. But that’s not the point. You made the offer, and then had to rescind it, and the timing of that is what gives me pause for more careful thought (not paranoia as you infer). Even though I really don’t have a dog in this fight and couldn’t care less about making my M22’s sound different, or even “better”, I was ready to buy a set if Ian indorsed it under you most generous offer to send him one. I was also very interested in a crossover for my M80’s, as I am currently using resisters and would be interested in a different crossover design for them that would allow me to pull the resisters out. I am less inclined to do so now, but still reserving judgment until I see how this all shakes out. Bad timing or not, I am disappointed that you can not, for whatever reason, send Axiom a crossover. I believe that Ian and his gang would give a very unbiased report of the testing results and blind listening in a controlled environment.

Jack,

If you recall, I came to Sean's defence when he was being grilled before anyone else. I am still trying to keep an open mind about these timing coincidences. Don't tar and feather me just yet.

Personally, I would love to participate in a blind listening test comparing a modded M22 vs a stock M22. Does your crossover mod change the crossover slope or frequencies at all? If it does, then, naturally, it will affect the sound of the speaker in a way that some people might prefer. But you don't need expensive components to modify the slope or crossover points.

Oh, and about you posting here, as long as you don't act like a shill and keep things civil, I think we'd all agree that you're welcome to argue your point of view.

I'm just starting to read this thread but am generally in agreement with Peter. I would do a blind test at my place and take Ninja up on the offer for a free trial XO, though i own M60s and not M22s required for the challenge (it is too bad since i've been itching for some more speaker tests and reviews lately...maybe over winter).

However i will at least sat this much, an "upgrade" to one may be a piece of junk to another but changing crossovers is not snake oil, it is simply swapping one speaker component for something else which can certainly change sound characteristics, for better OR worse.

The term upgrade is being tossed out like these different XO components are beneficial. In reality they are simply producing a different sound when used in the M22 (see the Ninja pages frequency graphs taken with a grain of salt since details of those measuring conditions is lacking).Whether anyone prefers that new sound is up to the individual but using the term upgrade is rather typical for marketing the product and i always cock a cautious eyebrow when i hear the term.

_________________________"Those who preach the myths of audio are ignorant of truth."

I think we're being too hard on Ninja. Sure the timing is unfortunate but my experience with technology licenses is that they drag on forever and you never know if they will really close or not until the day they (finally) get signed.

I would not be surprised if the new crossover sounded better, and I doubt the folks at Axiom would be all that surprised either. I believe the crossovers in the production Axiom speakers get changed occasionally, although I'm not sure whether the changes are to accomodate a "new improved" design, or to compensate for changes in the driver components, or both.

Now, leaping cheerfully into shoes I haven't earned...

If I were in Ian's shoes, I probably wouldn't want to see the design of the crossover, if only because if there was one of those "obvious once you see it" improvements it would be a real awkward situation re: adopting the idea -- and it would drive me crazy if I *couldn't* adopt it

If I were in Sean's shoes, I would quietly fix up the graph as Tom suggested because my target market will be every bit as nitpicky as we are, maybe even more so. The vertical offset in the graphs set off a red flag for me and immediately made me suspicious that something else was being "snuck into the picture" although I certainly couldn't find anything amiss and the graphs did look reasonable.

If I was... well... all of you nice folks... I would try to encourage the discussion to continue. One of the nice things about the Axiom forum is that we don't babble on at length about the kind of extraordinary sound you can only get if the speaker wires are precisely 4.5" off the ground (for 8 ohm speakers, of course)... but on the other hand there are some characteristics of a sound system we don't know enough about and probably would do well to discuss a bit more (soundstage width, imaging, all the words like "grittiness" which I can sometimes imagine I hear but can not explain).

I don't know what makes one speaker differ from another in those nuances and the crossover may be one of the elements (presumably phase response). Could be the drivers, could be the placement of the drivers on the front panel, heck I even hear credible people saying the electronics make a difference.

Anyways, the challenge with talking about all that stuff is that you need to be both extremely suspicious and extremely respectful at the same time. That makes for a very high bar and I'm not sure we totally met it in this thread.

Anyways, if the test is still on I'm sure looking forward to the results. Calgary isn't that far away, is it ?